Jodrell writes: "(via PerlMonks) Bernd Dulfer has posted a Quick Reference Guide to Perl 6, based on Larry's Apocalypses and Damian's Exegesises, as well as Parrot. The Guide is available in POD and RTF formats."

An anonymous reader writes "Vnunet reports on the low adoption of Apache 2 has caused its producers to advocate freezing development of the open-source Web server until makers of add-in software catch up. Almost six months after the launch of Apache 2, less than one percent of sites use it, due to a lack of suitable third-party modules." I'm not sure where they are getting the freezing Apache development part, more talk about forking for 2.1 right now on the httpd mailing list. The article does have it right though that until there is a reason to upgrade and the modules are in place that adoption is not going to happen. While the cores of both Perl and PHP are thread-safe, the third-party modules are not. This renders one the larger reasons to use Apache 2.0, the threaded http support, useless for applications using either of these application layers. It comes down to the question of whether the third-party module writers are better off supporting what is used or what is new.

Not only did Larry Wall answer your questions, but he said they were excellent questions. You've got to love Larry Wall, not just because he's a nice guy and created Perl, but also because he is the first Slashdot interview guest ever to send his answers preformatted in squeaky-clean HTML. We appreciate this like you wouldn't believe. They're great answers, too -- straightforward, heartfelt, and entertaining. Enjoy!

Alexander Moskalyuk writes "Most of the people I know have a love-hate relationship with Kip Irvine's Assembly Language for Intel-based Computers. Ask any student who used this textbook and you will either get a cheerful 'I've used it, it's great, I learned Assembly, and it has lots of useful examples' or resentful 'The book is horrible, hard to follow and full of code that is irrelevant to the contents of a specific chapter.'" Alexander's review of the book (below) concentrates on its role as an instructional aid, and on the differences between the third and fourth editions.

Updates from the field on Google access in the People's Republic of China, Lance Bass's space-shot (shot down), the gaming ban in Greece, recording artists and Internet music downloads, and more. Read on for the details.

Slashback tonight with a few words on forcing Open software, NASA mind-reading tricks, a reminder of one nice way not to pay for an MP3 decoder, and more. Read on for the details. Update: 08/28 00:36 GMT by T : Oops -- No DoubleClick news tonight, as the original headline implied. Regrets.

About what? Perl is probably a good topic choice. No one knows more about Perl than Larry Wall, right? We'll send 10 of the highest-moderated questions to Larry by email, and post his answers when we get them back. Note: Due to Slashdot's line length restrictions, lines of code over 50 characters long may not display correctly. Please be aware of this if you include code samples in your question.

Froze asks: "This is the beginning of my seventh year in school (yes, I am a grad student) and I am looking for the most cost effective solution in a scientifically oriented PDA. A strong compatibility with Linux is a must. My background is in Physics and Mathematics, so it would be nice to have some way of handling mathematical input (like the Zaurus). An on-board language would be a plus as well, something along the lines of bash, Perl, or Java would do."

prostoalex writes "Come gather round Mongers, whatever you code, And admit that your forehead's about to explode, 'Cos Perl patterns induce complete brain overload, If there's source code you should be maintainin', Then you better start learnin' Perl 6 patterns soon, For the regexes, they are a-changin'. This remix of Bob Dylan serves as an epigraph to Exegesis 5."

prostoalex writes: "In the world of information technology, information, as the name suggests, is as important as technology itself. Erik T. Ray's and Jason McIntosh's Perl and XML is an attempt to take a look at perhaps the most popular languages for data processing. XML is an open-standard specification for documents, while Perl's natural powers lie in the area of data processing, and, as the name suggests, practical extracting and reporting." Prostalex has reviewed Perl & XML below; read on for his take on the book.

prostoalex writes "Scientists at Gemini Observatory are using Internet2 to link telescopes worldwide and receive images that they say are sharper than those coming from Hubble."

Grok writes "You may have heard about a company named ActiveState before. Maybe you're a Perl programmer and have used ActivePerl, ActivePython or some of their other various programming-related tools. Well, today MozillaNews has an interview with David Ascher, a senior programmer at ActiveState, and the tech lead for Komodo, the cross-platform, multi-language IDE based on Mozilla."

When direct database access to the information you need isn't available, but web pages with the right data are, you might pursue "screen-scraping" -- fetching a web page and scanning its text for the appropriate pieces of text in order to do further processing. LWP (Library for WWW access in Perl) is a collection of module to help you do this. mir writes: " Perl & LWP is a solid, no-nonsense book that will teach you how to do screen-scraping using Perl. It describes how to automatically retrieve and use information from the web. An introduction to LWP and related modules from simple to advanced uses and various ways to extract information from the returned HTML."

BorrisYeltsin writes "The Parrot project has just released a functional compiler for Parrot. Almost all of the previous Apocalypses have been implemented as well as some other toys, including but not limited to: Ruby and Python parsers, BASIC and Scheme interpreters and a Forth compiler, the team are now working on Perl 6 regexes. Check it out at cvs.perl.org."

mbadolato writes "I'm surprised this hasn't been reported yet. Over at use.perl they're reporting that when the current issue of SysAdmin comes out, this will be the last installment of The Perl Journal. It's a shame. TPJ originally was stopped as a stand-alone, but was then included into Sysadmin. Now that's going too. We all owe a big thanks to all the contributers, and to Jon Orwant, for providing us a great resource in TPJ over the years."

passthecrackpipe writes "Leonard Lin has put up the presentation Lawrence Lessig gave at OSCON (mirror). It is great. It requires Flash." Nice Flash work, very impressive, and of course Lessig is a superior speaker. Worth your time and the 8Mb download.

Lumpish Scholar writes "ActiveState founder Dick Hardt has quit. Or, as the press release puts it, "ActiveState Expands Board & Founder Steps Aside." No reason for the resignation was given, unless you count, "The company is looking to become a $100 million company, and they're looking for someone ... that [sic.] has that experience." ActiveState (profitably!) distributes its own proprietary products, and also both free and commercially supported versions of Perl, PHP, Python, Tcl, and XSLT, having given back significantly to the free / Open Source communities associated with those languages."

davorg writes "In the dim and distant past when I first started doing web development, there was a book that everybody had a copy of. It was called 'How to Set Up and Maintain a Web Site' and it was by Lincoln Stein. The reason why everyone owned (and, more importantly, read) it was that it contained a complete high-level snapshot of everything you needed to know in order to run a web site at that time. Unfortunately, after a second edition in 1997 the book hasn't been updated. I suppose that the subject area has grown so much that no-one thought that a complete overview would be too high-level to be useful. They were probably right." davorg's review continues below.

BorrisYeltsin writes "Big news in the Perl community this week is that Parrot 0.0.7 now out. New in this release is "Perl 6 grammar (with small, partial compiler), functional subroutine, coroutine and continuation PMCs, global variables, an intermediate code compiler (imcc), a pure-Perl assembler and working garbage collection." Also there are more Parrot docs! Check out the news here."

Jamie Zawinski writes "Mark your calendars: on Thursday, August 22nd, we're throwing a benefit party for the EFF at DNA Lounge in San Francisco! In addition to great music from DDR, Kid606, and many others, you can also witness the carnage of the first ever Wil Wheaton versus Barney Celebrity Boxing Match! Can Wil, with his backing from the EFF, protect free speech and parody on the Internet and defeat Barney and his team of corporate lawyers? You can also join us earlier in the evening and meet Wil at a special VIP party: see the DNA Lounge announcement or the EFF press release for more details." Even if you can't attend, isn't now a good time to renew your membership?